


First Impression

by whathappensinthewoods



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 17:38:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18721804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whathappensinthewoods/pseuds/whathappensinthewoods
Summary: The Buran has been destroyed. Admiral Katrina Cornwell rushes to the hospital to get her first impression of the lone survivor, a man that she does not yet realize is not the real Captain Gabriel Lorca.





	First Impression

Admiral Katrina Cornwell has several hundred things she should be focusing on in directing her portion of the front in the Klingon War, most of them urgent, but all of that is eclipsed when she first gets the report of the destruction of the USS _Buran._ It hits her like a physical blow; she has to clear her staff out of her office because all she can think of is Gabriel. Her sometimes lover and oldest friend, Starfleet had been taking plenty of losses lately, but she hadn’t anticipated, hadn’t prepared herself for this one. She hadn’t had time to think of Gabriel, not in a long time, even in the months before the war the admiralty had been keeping her busy. She tries to remember when the last time she commed him was, how many months it had been since she last heard his voice and she can’t. He’d been busy, too, of course. That was the story of their relationship, really, which could have been much more than what it ended up: they’d both always been too busy. 

She’s still in shock, only just slipping into mourning, when a second report comes two hours later from the USS _Jonathan Archer,_ that a single life pod has been found, with a single survivor: Captain Gabriel Lorca. The wave of thankfulness that washes over her is quickly overshadowed by too many questions, particularly as further reports come in, including the initial statement taken from Gabriel, that he destroyed his own ship rather than facing a losing battle against the Klingons. The _Jonathan Archer_ reports that they’re taking him to Starbase 19 for medical treatment and she responds that they should forward all further reports to her shuttle. It will take most of a day for her to reach Starbase 19 by shuttle and her schedule doesn’t have that sort of time to spare, but she doesn’t care, she needs to see him, see that he’s still alive for herself. The beauty of being an Admiral is that sometimes she can say ‘damn the schedule,’ drop everything and go. Within the half-hour she’s en route. 

She’s several hours into the journey when a live call comes to her comm. ‘Captain Tomlinson, Gordon S. (Retired)’ the source indicator reads. Cappy Tomlinson had been Gabriel’s first captain on the USS _Icarus,_ the deep space survey ship he’d been assigned to right after graduating from the Academy. She’d gotten to know him as she’d quickly become the person to most frequently comm the _Icarus,_ from her own first posting on the USS _Trygve Lie._ Cappy Tomlinson had reached mandatory retirement age twenty years ago, but still remained knee-deep in Starfleet’s business from the outside, something that she hadn’t previously minded. He knew his stuff. 

But when she answers the comm, the first thing he says, without any preamble, is, “That isn’t Gabriel Lorca.” He looks familiar, his hair long gone pure white, but his face otherwise solid, steady, eyes bright blue and discerning. But his tone isn’t steady at all. She’s never heard that tone from him. 

“Excuse me?” 

“I know Gabriel Lorca,” he says. “I’ve known him for a very long time, Katrina. That isn’t him.”

“Slow down,” she says. “What do you mean? Do you think the _Jonathan Archer_ misidentified him? They scanned his fingerprints when they picked him up. They matched.”

“Oh, I’m sure they did,” Cappy answers. “But that isn’t him.”

“I’m not following you, Cappy.”

“I commed him. I just got off the comm with him- that man, not Gabriel,” Cappy says. “He didn’t talk like him. He didn’t act like him. He tried to bluff, but I don’t even think he knew who I was. He called me ‘Captain Tomlinson.’ When I called him on that, he called me ‘Gordon.’”

“That is your name,” Kat offers. But she saw his point. No one had called Gordon Tomlinson anything but ‘Cappy’ in… well, forever, as far as she was aware of. Admiral Kilpatrick had even called him ‘Cappy’ at his retirement ceremony. 

“I’m telling you, Katrina, he isn’t right.”

“He’s been through a lot,” she answers. “Trauma. Injury. The _Jonathan Archer_ reported he has a head injury.” She tries not to think of the possibility of brain damage. “He’s probably not thinking straight.” 

“Or,” Cappy offered, “It isn’t him.”

“Who else would it be?” she asks, already beginning to become exasperated with the circular nature of this conversation.

“A Klingon plant,” Cappy said. “He was found in a pod by himself, how many hours after the ship was destroyed? I’m told the _Jonathan Archer_ arrived on scene four hours after the _Buran_ reported contact with the Klingons. It took them, what, another two hours to find this Gabriel Lorca? That’s plenty of time to have replaced the real thing.” 

“Cappy, they matched his finger prints.”

“Fine, then, it’s a clone.”

“Do you realize how paranoid you sound?” Her voice is sharper than she intends. There’s a long, heavy pause and she realizes how easy it might be to break up a years-long friendship by accusing the other party of being crazy. 

“Gabriel Lorca would have gone down with his ship,” Cappy answers finally. She can see in his face, that he considers this incontrovertible proof. And the crux of the thing is this: she’d always thought so, too; that if the time came, Gabriel Lorca would go down with his ship. At the very least, she couldn’t envision a situation in which he would allow himself to be the lone survivor, never mind the one to have destroyed the ship himself. But she’d been trying to justify all that in her mind for the last hours, scouring the _Jonathan Archer’s_ reports for any sort of clues. From what they could determine, the ship had been heavily damaged in battle. It had lost a nacelle, which had been found severed before the rest of the wreckage was located. In all probability the _Buran_ would have foundered anyway. Maybe Gabriel considered it important to deliver the death blow himself. Maybe he didn’t realize that he was the only one who would make it to the life pods in time. 

“Thank you, Cappy,” she says stiffly, “For sharing your concerns. I’ll be at Starbase 19 in six hours. I’ll judge the situation from there for myself.” With that, she ends the call. 

She thinks to herself, calculates, Cappy Tomlinson must certainly be ninety-five now, maybe ninety-six. She would have to ask someone to look in on him, when she got the chance. Clearly some sort of senility or dementia must be setting in; it made much more sense than the idea that Gabriel Lorca had been replaced by a Klingon-planted clone. It was tragic, of course, to see such a sharp mind go, but what else could she think? She just hopes that he didn’t direct too much delusional rambling at Gabriel. Gabriel would have to be upset, of course he would be, and to hear such things from the man who’d been his mentor his entire career could only make things worse. She considered comming the hospital herself, speaking to Gabriel now, but it would be better to let him get treatment and rest, and to see him in person. She tries to put Cappy’s words out of her mind. But still, the six hours following, until her shuttle docks with Starbase 19 are uneasy. 

She heads straight for the medical section of the station as soon as she disembarks, and once there looks up in the hospital directory where to find Gabriel. She flags down a doctor before she goes to his room. “How is he?” she asks.

The doctor is quick to offer answers. The admiral’s badge on her chest ensures that. “The life pod rolled when the blast wave hit it and he sustained a number of minor injuries from that. He came in with a broken wrist and a broken collar bone, assorted bruises and a head laceration from that, all of which we’ve fixed already. He also has a moderate concussion, which we’re monitoring. His biggest problem is that he apparently stared straight into the blast when his ship was destroyed, which flash damaged his eyes.”

“How bad is it?” she asks.

“He’s experiencing extreme light sensitivity at the moment and a fairly significant loss of visual acuity,” the doctor answers. “We’re waiting to see if and how much that resolves before considering treatment options.” It hits her with a pang that the doctor’s edging around saying that Gabriel might be permanently blinded. She’d always thought he had such beautiful eyes; the strange electric blue of prosthetics wouldn’t be the same. But still, at least he was alive. 

“We’re also waiting on a psych evaluation, considering what happened,” the doctor adds. “It’s scheduled for tomorrow morning.” That’s probably the report she’s most anxious to read. She nods and thanks the doctor and sends him on his way.

Then she walks into Gabriel’s hospital room. The lights are low, but there he sits up in bed, back straight against the wall behind him, staring straight ahead, his hands in constant motion, twisting the sheets on his lap in front of him, his only sign of duress besides the tense set of his shoulders. His face is blank, expressionless. He doesn’t notice her entrance.

“Gabriel,” she asks, “How are you feeling?” When all else fails, she defaults to that old shrink’s question.

He visibly startles, hearing her voice. “Who is it?” he says sharply, turning to look at her, and there isn’t a trace of recognition in his eyes when he does. 

_‘That isn’t Gabriel Lorca,’_ Cappy Tomlinson’s voice cuts through her head. 

And it hurts her, to hear him say those words, to see those empty eyes. “It’s Kat,” she says, trying and failing to keep that hurt out of her voice.

“Kat,” he echoes. But then his shoulders relax, if only a little and his voice softens as he says, “I’m sorry, Kat, of course it’s you. You just startled me, is all. And I can’t see worth a damn.” And it’s true, even in the dimmed light, he squints, looking to her, his eyes visibly watering. His voice is comforting, familiar. What is she doing, she asks herself, looking for recognition in the eyes of a man who is half blind?

“It’s fine,” she tells him.

He doesn’t offer anything to fill the space in the conversation. The hospital gown he wears doesn’t suit him or the set of his shoulders. Those shoulders belonged in a uniform and those hands that worried the sheets in front of him needed to be doing something, needed to be occupied. Her first impression is that of a man who has found himself utterly misplaced. More than that, behind all of that, he looks trapped. 

But it strikes her as utterly ridiculous to be thinking about first impressions with a man she’d known since he was barely a man, since he was the nineteen year old first year Academy cadet that she’d bonded with in their first week of the Service Safety Practicum because they both came from the sort of places where cows and chickens still outnumbered people, his Georgia to her Iowa, amongst their classmates from glittering metropolises like Paris and Tokyo and exotic-sounding off-world locales like Amazonis Planitia Colony or Enceledus Research Station or Denobula or that one human-Vulcan hybrid colony whose name neither of them ever learned to pronounce or remembered how to spell.

“I heard Cappy called you,” she tells him.

“Did he comm you, too?” 

“He was concerned about you,” she broaches. “That you’re acting out of character.” ‘That you’re a cloned Klingon plant,’ seemed too ridiculous to mention. “It seems he was always certain that you would be the kind of captain that would go down with your ship.”

But he doesn’t respond to the matter of going down with his ship or not. She can’t decide whether in the pause he shifts guiltily or if it’s just her imagination. But of course, she chides herself, there must be some level of survivor’s guilt, while she stands here and tries to address him on the issue of ‘why aren’t you dead, too?’ “What about you?” he asks instead, when he does answer. “Don’t you prefer me alive?”

And of course she does, that’s the thing. She knows from years of experience in psychiatry that brain injury and trauma and guilt, they can all effect behavior, they could all account for the set of his shoulders and his too-erect posture that makes him look less like a man rescued and more like a wild animal caught in a snare. “Yes,” she tells him honestly. “…It hurt when I heard the Buran was destroyed.”

“Yes, well, it hurt me, too.” He speaks of difficult things in gruff understatement and that, at least, is in character.

“Whatever else happened… whatever else is wrong,” she says, “I’m glad you’re alive.”

“Nothing’s wrong, Kat,” he says. “I just lost my ship and… I’m just a little banged up, that’s all.”

And what’s thirty-four years of friendship and more good for, she thinks, if you can’t trust in it? “Alright, Gabriel,” she says, choosing to believe him.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for The Admiral’s Legion’s May Fanworks Challenge for the prompt ‘First Impression.’ I went with Kat’s first impression of someone else, which may or may not be what the prompt intended. I tried?
> 
> I’m not sure if Discovery has actually said where Kat and Gabriel are supposed to be from at any point, but I decided to make her from Iowa because that would give them a reason to be in Iowa off all places for meteor shower watching and him from Georgia because the only other major example that I’ve seen of Jason Isaacs doing a Southern accent was from Black Hawk Down, and that was meant to be Georgian. I’m keeping it as headcannon until I find a compelling reason to do otherwise. I also made up their first duty stations, with no evidence besides that I wanted to. ‘Icarus’ sounds cool and has a terrible flight-related back story; read some Greek mythology if you don’t recognize it. Trygve Lie was the first Secretary General of the United Nations. Furthermore, I'm not sure if there's a ship called Jonathan Archer in Discovery yet, but if there isn't there needs to be.
> 
> Kat and Gabriel belong to Disco. I made Cappy Tomlinson up. He’s part of my extensive headcannon, because I believe that poor forlorn and MIA Prime Gabriel deserves both a past and future. So, for that matter, does Kat.
> 
> Also, please forgive me for any mistakes in spelling, grammar, cannon (although, honestly, screw cannon) and anything else I may have done wrong. I haven’t written fanfiction for any sort of online publication in like… eight years and I’ve never had a beta-reader. As a historical trend, many people find my usage of commas to be, while not technically incorrect, at the very least egregiously excessive. Mea culpa. Furthermore, I joined Archive to write this, so I’m probably doing something wrong with tagging or whatever, I have no idea. Anyway, all errors are my own.


End file.
